With the help of our customers, we continue to evolve and adapt Citrix Workspace Environment Manager (WEM) to deliver a great admin and user experience. In our latest release, we wanted to focus on a few features requested by our customers, including this generally available feature and these three technical previews:

  • Support for editing Group Policy settings
  • Enhanced Support for optimizing multi-session OS machines (Tech Preview)
  • Profile container insights (Tech Preview)
  • Wake on LAN Support (Tech Preview)

Let’s take a closer look at each.

Support for Editing Group Policy Settings

Customers traditionally use Citrix WEM to deploy their Group Policy Objects (GPOs) to their Action Groups to support a better user experience. This enables admins to have these GPOs pre-loaded before users logon, delivering a faster login process.

Before, admins within the Citrix WEM administrative console could only change the GPOs name, description, and user group assignment. With Flexible Group Policy Management, admins now have the flexibility to go with their current available options or modify the GPO within the administrative console based on corporate requirements. Admins can change GPO registry settings without ever leaving the Citrix WEM administrative console.

Enhanced Support for Optimizing Multi-Session OS Machines (Tech Preview)

Multi-session OS machines run multiple sessions from a single machine to help deliver apps and desktops to users. Typically a disconnected session remains active, and its applications will continue to run. In some cases, this can result in a loss of host resources. Enhanced support for optimizing multi-session OS machines enables admins to decrease the resources used by disconnected sessions by optimizing resources used by idle sessions, contributing more host resources to active sessions. This results in the ability to host more concurrent sessions without a hardware upgrade. Every penny (or resource) counts.

To take advantage of enhanced support for optimizing multi-session OS machines, admins must first enable the feature in the Multi-session Optimization tab under System Optimization, as shown below.

If there are key processes you want to prioritize, they can be excluded and applied to an exclusion list.

Profile Container Insights (Tech Preview)

Profile container monitoring has always been a primary concern for admins. They typically will need a third-party solution such as FSLogix to access these insights and monitor profile containers. We are happy to announce that now, as a part of the Citrix WEM service, admins can monitor profile containers without any third-party solution with profile container insights. As a part of this Tech Preview, admins can now navigate to the Monitoring tab and select Profile Container Insights. The Profile Container Insights portion will display detailed information to help admins identify issues such as potential space issues.

Wake on LAN Support (WOL) (Tech Preview)

Wake on LAN support enables admins to take advantage of the great benefits of Wake on LAN settings on supported WEM agents. With it, admins can help to reduce energy consumption and an organization’s carbon footprint by controlling on/off settings for their WEM agents with WOL support in the Citrix WEM administrative console.

To wake your device remotely, navigate to the WEM administrative console and select the agent you want to wake by clicking the “Wake up agent” button at the bottom. WEM will automatically select the agents that reside on the same subnet as the target device and use those agents as WoL messengers to boot up the device. Here is a screenshot of Wake on LAN Support in action.

We are excited about the new feature and the Tech Previews that are available with this release. Interested in participating in the Tech Previews? Email me at cheng.zhang@citrix.com or my colleague Wayne Liu at wayne.liu@citrix.com to get started.

To learn more, visit our Citrix Workspace Environment Management page, and check out our What’s New page for the latest on Citrix Workspace Environment Management.